As someone who reads comics on a fairly frequent basis, you'd think that I would be used to interesting ideas being ultimately pissed away into nothing, like a college student who was really smart in high school just deciding to be the dumbest person imaginable in all of their classes. Whoops, that gave away my feelings on most of the New 52 right away! But seriously, I always hate it when a TV show starts off with really good ideas and manages to do away with all of that over the course of one entire episode, something I as a How I Met Your Mother fan learned all too well earlier this year. It's even worse when all the good ideas manage to piss themselves over the course of the entire season, because it's almost torturous, like being forced to watch all the worst Family Guy gags over an entire weekend while someone occasionally lets you stop to punch you in the stomach.

Case in point, Teen Wolf season 4. With Allison dead and Isaac on The Originals this year, the last season ended with Derek kidnapped by a resurrected Kate Argent, now a werejaguar (whatever the fuck that is), and taking him to Mexico. Some contrived Mexico bullshit happens involving a stereotypically Mexican hunter family, where Scott and crew find Derek a teenager and no longer a Beta. Kate finds 15-year-old Derek, manipulates him, makes out with him in what's certainly one of the sketchiest things I've ever fucking seen in a TV show since Jamie raped Cersei in front of her dead child in the last season of Game of Thrones, all for the purpose of learning how to control her transformations. Keep in mind that Stiles learned most of the werewolf mythology literally in the very first episode, so in addition to having the curse of all their women die because of literally one teenager, the Argents all have the ability to not use Wikipedia. Anyway, all of this leads to everyone's favorite mind rapist Peter Hale losing $117 million in bearer bonds and it being used to fund a dead pool, bringing a number of assassins to Beacon Hills to wipe out the supernatural people of the city. And two episodes into the finale, the conspirator known as the Benefactor is finally revealed: a Banshee mentally heard Peter's insane ramblings of wiping out the supernatural of Beacon Hills while he was still in the coma from the Hale fire.

An issue I've always had with Teen Wolf is that the way they handle plotting is like Rube Goldberg coming up with a game after he's done brown acid and a six inch table's worth of cocaine. I swear this show takes the hardest and most irritating path to figuring shit out; most of the people I know called Peter being the Benefactor weeks before that reveal. But the show threw him out of the running by having him say that he wasn't the Benefactor, and then it's revealed he is! Even the "he was a madman back then" excuse is hollow because some burns and fabulous v-necks aside, there's no real difference between the Peter Hale back then and the Peter Hale now. It's hard to buy him as anything other than a villain, which is why having him be Malia's father was always gonna end with someone being double crossed. Part of this is because Ian Bohen plays him really well, the other part of it is that the show has no idea what to do with him. Penultimate episode before the finale, the show tries to make him the main villain and have him go after Scott to reclaim his power. But the only time the show acknowledged that plot beforehand was literally summer 2013, because they've had him mostly sitting around and snarking like a passive aggressive film snob stuck at a screening for Avengers: Age of Ultron and still thinking that people who like superhero films are pathetic manbabies who need to mature.

The reason I can say this season of Teen Wolf has good ideas but shitty resolutions is because the dead pool storyline takes center stage for most of this and ends up being resolved via a fucking email. No seriously, that's exactly what happens. There's a multitude of assassins here with their interesting hooks; a pair of teenagers who go to school with the new cast additions, a Mute with literally no mouth who talks via an electronic interface, a chemist who initiates a quarantine, all of them killed just as soon as they showed up. Kate has a pair of Norse Berserkers doing her bidding, but their only reason for being in the show is showing up to kick Team Scott's ass. Literally in the last five minutes of the penultimate episode, it's revealed that they're people whose animalistic sides have taken over and Kate tries to do the same thing to Scott. And I would've thought the show would take this moment to explore the fact that Scott "True Alpha Who Can Do No Wrong and Who Is Becoming the Batman at this Point" can be a monster just like any of the other supernatural foes he's faced, but nope, the kid he bit gives him an uplifting speech and Scott tears the Berserker armor off, beats Peter and delivers the line "You were never an Alpha, Peter, but you were always a monster", and I can hear David Goyer demanding his money from Jeff Davis for cribbing one of his lines.

I guess I should also mention that there are two new wolves added to Scott's pack. There's Malia, Peter's daughter, the girl who was missing for 8 years, and literally lost her virginity to Stiles as they were both in a mental institution (no seriously, this is a thing that Jeff Davis wrote). I like her actress and I like her bluntness and lack of awareness in the world, and she's mostly harmless. I don't have a real stake in any of the relationships in this show, so I was alright with her making Stiles her scratching post. The one I've got more of an issue with is Liam, the kid Scott bites. He's actually a teenager, and may actually be the only real teenager in this show, which is highlighted particularly when he has PTSD from being beaten down by the Berserkers. There's appeal in watching a supernatural person having a very human breakdown, but it's never brought up in the finale except in an offhand conversation, and there's no real resolution.

Speaking of 'no real resolution', Derek Fucking Hale. After being aged back to his normal age, Derek starts losing his powers and reverting to a human. All signs in the show literally pointed to him dying; he was totally fine with being a human, he was learning how to defend himself as a human, and a Berserker literally threw him out of a van and stabbed him five times in the finale. He bled out and passed out with his final wish being to "save Scott", because everyone knows that Derek is the Robin to Scott's Batman. But fucking Jeff Davis pulls the ultimate fucking goddamn comic book movie "Let's give Coulson a fucking TV show and undermine his entire sons of bitching death" trope and revives fucking Derek, turning him into a fucking Black Wolf, whatever the fucking fuck that fucking is. If you put me within five feet of Jeff Davis after that, I would've torn off his arm and beaten him to death with it while repeating "THAT IS NOT HOW A WRITE A CHARACTER ARC, YOU SON OF A BITCH!"

Overall, Teen Wolf season 4 is full of good ideas that manage to be dumped into a bin of piss and vomit as soon as they're introduced. The assassin storyline could've carried an entire season; Peter trying to become an Alpha again could've taken up at least half a season. The new characters are ultimately harmless and inoffensive, but the show doesn't have the balls to have them go through human moments for more than 10 minutes. None of the old cast members really have anything interesting going on outside of the plot, except that apparently they all go through financial issues right at the same moment which is then also resolved with the skill and grace of a public speaker suddenly having racist rants during an NAACP rally in Ferguson. And for making a big fucking deal out of Kate returning, the show doesn't really let her do much besides look psychotic and hot, which we already saw during season one. She doesn't really do anything except for in the first two and final two episodes, and even then, she's always running. Running like the show seems to run away from logic; maybe someone should put a hit out on its complicated logic instead of its supernatural protagonists.

There’s this approach to writing known as the “kitchen sink” approach which basically means that the writer throws in any idea or concept that comes out of their incredibly jumbled mind like a six-year-old getting out the Legos at daycare. The problem with this approach is that once you do that, you have to come up with some sort of vague thing to link all of these together, and justifying that link in a comprehensible and believable way is more difficult than trying to write down the lyrics to a Sting album. I find myself reminded of this as I watched the third season of American Horror Story, the show that practically defines the “kitchen sink” approach at this point. But where the previous seasons did their best to hide the fact that they were basically just throwing shit at a wall and trying to find what sticks, season three’s throwing is so bad and the shit smells so bad that it smells like month-old trash.

After an effectively creepy prologue in 1800s New Orleans with Cathy Bates,Coven takes us back to the modern day where we meet Zoe, who learns that she’s a witch just after takes her relationship with her boyfriend to the next level and she kills him with her vagina. No seriously, it’s like Teeth, if Teeth just made the receiver’s body go into cardiac arrest. Not exactly wanting to be known around high school as the girl with the literal “killer vagina”, Zoe is moved to New Orleans to an academy for young witches to hone their powers. And apparently the academy is on holiday break, because there are only 3 other girls her age who train there. But this is just the beginning, as the girls must discover who among them will usurp Jessica Lange as the new Supreme. Wait, my bad, it’s actually about Jessica Lange trying to stave off her mortality with the help of Cathy Bates’, now immortal thanks to the also immortal Angela Bassett. Nope, I’m wrong again, it’s about these witch hunters who want to…or maybe it’s about Lily Rabe’s Misty Day and learning how she survived being burned at the stake.

If it sounds like I don’t have a solid grip on the overarching plot of Coven, it’s because I really don’t. The previous season, Asylum, tackled an insane asylum (obviously), mutants, Nazi scientists, Anne Frank (no seriously), aliens, demons, a serial killer rapist, the son of said serial killer rapist, and the one woman whose arrival into the insane asylum more or less brought all those things together as they ganged up on her and tried to break her will and force her into the dark complacency of a post WWII-America. Despite it all, the main plot was always at the front and center, and everything else was going on in the background. They rarely, if ever, took up more screentime than Lana and how she survived the asylum. Coven is so eager to try and catch up to Asylum that it stuffs itself with too many ideas and just ends up collapsing all over itself.

The show’s main thing is that it tries to blend horror and humor in a way that comes off as wacky while remaining in the realms of feasibility it sets for itself. And in a way, that’s the biggest problem this season. Previous seasons had lines that were meant to be threatening and came off comical, like murder Santa from Asylum, but Coven takes it to a whole new level of wacky horror. There’s one scene involving this old guy getting killed, blood spurting from his neck like the Kool-Aid man did a spit take, but the blood comes out so much and the scene feels so overblown that it just felt laughable. I know that I can’t ask for grim darkness all the time considering this is from the guys who do Glee, but the season just can’t keep a consistent tone, and after a while it just starts getting to a new spectrum of weird when Emma Roberts dead body is being strung along by a butler in a dress and bonnet to death or Precious gets raped by a minotaur.

The whole rape thing that’s been happening each season to continue the plot really does give me the impression that the head writer or whoever suffers a messy breakup in between production and decides to insert it to “teach them a lesson”. And it starts getting to be a bit tired and irritating that the writers can’t think of some other way to advance things besides “girl gets raped”.

And while I’m unloading on Coven for its shitty gender politics, I hope the show wasn’t also trying to subtly say anything about those racial politics currently going on in America. Because if they did, that sure as shit backfired around the time a white guy started gunning down black people while Kathy Bates’ decapitated head tearfully watched video footage from the Civil Rights Movement in the room upstairs. It doesn’t help that a few episodes later, Bates’ character starts cutting up a black guy for no other reason than just because he had a cut on his arm. I get that she’s basically Paula Dean from the 1800s and racism is practically hard-wired into her brain, but she was making progress towards being a better person, so torturing “the help” feels like a scene from an earlier episode. Either have her wipe her skin with black babies’ blood or make her a tragic figure who feels regret for what she’s done, because you need to decide! Don’t just flip a shit in her head whenever you’re not paying attention.

Speaking of consistency, it’d be nice if Coven decided whether or not a character was dead for good or dead for about 20 minutes. Once the first character gets revived from death, all tension and impact is lost with each subsequent one knowing that off-screen, someone’s conjuring up a spell to bring them back to life while twirling to Stevie Nicks. This would be less of an issue if most of the people who came back to life didn’t all die by the end of the season, raising a big fat question along the lines of, “Why the fuck did the writers bring those people back just to kill them off in the final handful of episodes?” Time could’ve been better spent having the plot make some actual sense, like the witch hunters who introduced around the halfway point and killed off over the course of two episodes. It would’ve been nice for the hunters to have some personality among them, but they’re just a bunch of guys in suits. They don’t even seem to have a reason for wanting to kill the witches. And really the hunters are wasting their time, because they’re the worst coven of witches in the history of ever and spend more time insulting and killing each other rather than doing anything that could be considered “witch-y”.

Getting back to the witches, I know that they’re mostly teenagers and written to be catty and snipe at each other like a pair of mercenaries who are both going through a messy divorce, but this is the first time I can remember a group of AHS characters being just outright mean to each other. There’s a scene where Lily Rabe and Emma Roberts get into a fistfight and it goes on just long enough to where watching Rabe beat the shit out of Roberts goes from being funny to disturbingly cruel (actually the shit that happens to Roberts gets to be a bit much, even by my standards). Not that I’m asking for them to all be nice to each other all the time, but it’s hard to like these people when most of their actions seem to be driven by pure spite than any real logic, like the early season rivalry between Lange and Bassett. I don’t think anyone in this show left the season without doing at least three horrible things to someone else and thinking, “Fuck you bitch.”

It feels like more time was spent coming up with reasons for Jessica Lange and Angela Bassett to get into a snark contest, and while they and the some of the other actors all bounce off each other pretty well, the scripts are what weigh them down. Bates and Gabourey Sidibe have a weirdly good chemistry with each other, and it’s the moments with them that work the best at making Bates’ character feel like an actual person whose shot at redemption never comes because the show would rather her be a monster. Emma Roberts’ character is in need of a good direction or an earlier season that would’ve benefited from her natural wit and charm. Even Peters has the better performance between him and Taissa Farmiga when they’re on-screen together and even when they’re apart, but the real weak link here is Sarah Paulson’s Cordelia. She spends most of the season feeling like a bit character and getting slapped around by Jessica Lange, which is a shame after she was such a hit in Asylum. The show doesn’t really know what to do with her until the last few episodes, and by then, the damage has been done.

Ultimately what kills Coven for me is that it’s got too much going on, while at the same time, manages to feel like nothing’s happening on screen. The season clearly has ambitions to be like its older siblings, but it fails to capture the same greatness that Asylum did. For a show that brought together these women, the writers were apparently too starstruck to get much plotting and writing done. Lange and Paulson are old hands at working together, and everyone else but Bassett is just catching up with Lange, who at this point is trying to see how many Golden Globes she can fit in her trophy case before retiring from acting. Like I said earlier, Asylum managed to beat the sophomore slump that plagues other shows, so maybe it was only fate that Coven get the shit end of the deal. But even so, this is definitely the worst of the three seasons the show’s ever done.

And the worst part of it all is no naked man masturbates in broad daylight or over a dead body. I mean, I would’ve thought that that was the first thing they wrote on the writing board. Now that I think about it, maybe that’s how Lily Rabe was able to revive so many people this season.

And so we continue the adventures of Team Rick Grimes (insert guitar solo here), History’s Worst Last Hope for the Human Race. They’ve come so far since season one; before, they were banging each other’s wives and handcuffing friends to radiators, and now they’re a trained unit, the Seal Team Six of the apocalypse. I think I’d like to be a part of their group, although I don’t think I’d okay with it if it meant I’d be getting Tyreese killed by the fourth commercial break, all the while wondering when the timer on my collar will count down to zero.

Anyway, Walking Dead season 3 starts off with Commander Stuff n Things and his merry band of prisoners setting up shop in a prison to provide a home for Lori’s baby and get some well-needed R&R. Of course, this can’t carry a 16 episode season, so the big bad this time around is The Governor, a charismatic Southerner who’s set up a gated community for people to stay safe from the zombies and giving guns to anyone who’s willing to watch over the perimeter 24/7, like Daryl’s one-armed brother Merle. Mr. Governor finds Andrea and her new sword wielding pal Michonne and offer to take them into Woodbury, but as is the case with most gated communities in the South, all is not as it seems. It’s at this point the writers realize they’ve gone some good story ideas here and proceed to spend the rest of the day throwing darts at an intern tied to a table.

As fun as it is to watch Walker, Atlanta Ranger run his Ricktatorship and talk in hushed whispers, Walking Dead really has gotten crazier. In season two, the characters were the closest they’ve ever been to actual human beings. Yeah, Lori could never keep track of her kid and Hershel just seemed to be too oblivious to the horde of dead neighbors in his barn, but at least they had some logic behind their actions. Flashforward to season three, and 90% of the characters have the intelligence of someone who’s just snorted glue and heroin.

The writers have no clue what to do with these people; the moral compass wavers back and forth for most of them every other week while everyone stays who they are or just becomes window dressing. The Governor’s taking Hershel’s barn shtick to the extreme for a few episodes, but 20 minutes earlier, he guns down a squad of military dudes for no reason other than to take their stuff. Rick starts off playing everything to the vest and doesn’t take anyone’s crap, then weeks before the finale, he sits down with the Governor, talking about the weather and their March Madness brackets instead of killing the guy who's responsible for two of his group's deaths and nearly raped another member.

And there’s something fucked up about how they treat their female and black characters; the Governor sleeps with Andrea in one episode, who seems really oblivious to everything that goes on with him, even after seeing him cradling a dead zombie and surrounded by multiple zombie heads on the ground. There's also that aforementioned implied "could've happened if the politics season didn't make the topic a fucking skin disease" rape. During the first half of the season, four black guys died, each following one appearing around the same time frame just before the preceding one got capped.

Season 3’s tagline is “Fight the Dead, Fear the Living”. It’s probably safe to say that the tagline was originally “Fear the Living, Because These Guys are Fucking Nuts, And Fight the Dead When You’ve Got the Time”. So much of the season is spent having the characters talk to each other passive aggressively, hushed whispers, or going off of the deep end. That last one applies mainly to Rick and the Governor, who both seem to be trying to out-crazy each other. Rick spends quite a few episodes hallucinating dead friends and talking to them on the phone, and the Governor just decides to go all in and start gunning down members of his own group because they make fun of his haircut. To be fair, Andrew Lincoln and David Morissey are actually really great on the show, even if the latter's accent sort of fluctuates from time to time. Special props go out to Carl, who gets more badass with each episode; Glenn and Maggie, who may be the only hope for repopulating humanity by the series end; and Daryl, who according to my Tumblr and Twitter feeds, is the sexiest man alive, even beating Ryan Gosling.

Really though, when the zombies do show up, it's more to exacerbate the situation. The zombies are just a catalyst, a means to the end of breaking down the societal and psychological barriers between man and our ultimate primitive nature. With that in mind, the show is genuinely tense and thrilling when it wants to be, such as when someone lures an entire horde of Walkers to the prison and they just keep coming with no end in sight.

Having said that, the show needs to sit down and think about what it's ultimately trying to do. It needs to stop attempting to make us feel sympathy for characters we've grown to disliking 5 minutes before they die, trading black characters like they're fucking Pokemon, and quit getting showrunners like they're the Defense Against the Dark Arts position at Hogwarts.

There's a scene in the finale where a character, moments from dying says, "I tried". And you can practically sum up the entire season with those two words. It's still better than most of television today, and the acting and music are good, but the characters are more inconsistent than my sleeping patterns and its immaturity with women and minorities make me insulted to be half of its target audience. I can only hope Scott Gimple makes a more coherent season 4.

With Young Justice in limbo for the foreseeable future (I refuse to say the “C” word, because if Veronica Mars can get a movie, than this can return), I decided now would be the best time to go and review the series as a whole; partly because there really isn’t a way to review one season without reviewing the other, and also because I kinda wanna pad this out to avoid doing homework.

I kind of feel sorry for DC Comics fans. Strike that, I feel very sorry for DC comics fans. When the big guys aren’t hiring known homophobes to write one of their flagship characters or murdering children because by some law, kids are illegal as shit in that universe, they’re trying to find a way to alienate anyone who loved them before Wonder Woman and Superman started playing tonsil hockey and Starfire lost 3/4 of her closing and started sleeping with anyone who looked at her face rather than her boobs. And now they’re shifting the blame game to Cartoon Network to justify not renewing Young Justice and Green Lantern for new seasons like the shows in question are Aliens Colonial Marines; something about toy sales, something about the hiatus. I don’t really know who is to blame, but both parties should’ve done better. DC could’ve helped sell more toys other than those McDonalds things, and CN should not have just taken the shows off the air last October with no warning. But I’ll get to that later.

So after Marvel got bought by Disney and they decided to cancel Spectacular Spider-Man to be replaced with Ultimate, the producer of the former Greg Weisman teamed up with Brandon Vietti to create a show about teen DC heroes being a covert ops team for Batman. Robin, Kid Flash, Aqualad, Superboy, Miss Martian, and Artemis were the main heroes of Season One, battling bad guys, hormones and daddy issues.

Season One was known and somewhat detracted for being pretty much just a world builder; every episode had at least five DC characters thrown in like the writers were afraid people would forget that people were watching a DC cartoon because Kevin Conroy wasn’t voicing Batman. Lex Luthor, Joker, Vandal Savage, Icon, Captain Atom; if they were in the DC Comics or the Bruce Timm universe, there’s a good chance that Young Justice would use them. It was fine to an extent, but other times, it kinda felt like they were just reaching, like when they brought in Wendy and Marvin from the Super Friends. There was some count of at least 150 characters from DC Comics in the show by the end of the season, and I can believe that; sometimes they’d do that thing movies do where they focus the camera on a character who just showed up and slowly zoom in on their face, like they were saying “HAY GUYS DO YOU KNOW WHO THIS DC CHARACTER IS, WE DO, DID WE MENTION THAT WE’RE A DC CARTOON?!”

Still, one thing that Season One did, better than season two, and way better than what the New 52 is doing now, is the characters. All the characters feel fleshed out like actual people with their own motivations and backstories; as much as I didn’t particularly care for him, Wally West was interesting because they portrayed him as solely as a science guy and how he rationalized everything down to logic, even though he spent his time being friends with magicians and fish dudes who could make water weapons. One of my favorites from season one was Red Arrow. I don’t know much about him aside from being in Teen Titans, but here the show makes him a recurring character with his own character arc that, when it gets revealed, has you going back through each episode he was in and realize how carefully laid out how things were laid out that you didn’t even realize how off he was acting. This isn’t even just solely for the heroes; the real surprising thing this show did for me was make several C and D list villains like Black Manta, Cheshire, and Sportsmaster badass while also not being completely despicable. If anything, they’re more anti-heroes or mercenaries with just really messed up moral codes that have their own senses of honor, and the way they’re handled in season two with the heroes connected to them made me wonder what the hell was wrong with me for feeling sorry for Black Manta, the guy who’s killed a child and cut off Aquaman’s hand.

Something else noteworthy about this show is the casting. It’s amazing, but the interesting thing is how far out they went; how many shows have Nathan Drake, Gretchen Wieners, Ben 10, Winnie Cooper, Jayne Cobb, Cyborg, Itachi Uchiha, Max Goof, Admiral Anderson, Wash from Firefly, “Beautiful Soul”, Isabella from Phineas and Ferb, and Nikita talking to each other? Even some of the characters that I’m not fans of, I commend because their voice actors hit it out of the park. Major props to Jamie Thomason for choosing the voice actors.

With all the eggs in their basket, the show made a huge gamble with Season two, Invasion, and jumped forward five years in the future. To say that the timeskip went over poorly would be like saying Canadians love themselves some poutine; the biggest betrayal for fans was, and I’m not even joking here, Miss Martian and Superboy broke up and she started dating Lagoon Boy, but I’ll get back to that in a bit. As the subtitle implied, Season Two had the Team dealing with invading aliens that have been going around kidnapping humans, because aliens never come to Earth to see the sights or ask about spreading the word of Alien Jesus. It’s hard to talk about what happens in season two without either getting angry about the show’s current status or spoiling what I think are the best parts, but I’ll say that the show quickly gets us caught up on the old cast from season one, then really kicks it into high gear after episode four.

Jumping forward five years didn’t just make all the SuperMartian fans go “WTF” and the ladies cream their pants over Nightwing now being legal, Katie; new season means new heroes, and Invasion certainly had that. Blue Beetle, Wonder Girl, Beast Boy, Lagoon Boy, Tim Drake Robin, Batgirl, and others join the Team over the 20 episode season, but really, only Blue and Lagoon get more screentime and voice work than the ones I’m mentioning. Blue Beetle I get; a lot of this season is central to him and the aliens mostly arrive because of him, sort of. Lagoon Boy is a bit annoying in the first few episodes, and it’s pretty clear that he is just a rebound guy for M’gann, but then I started to sympathize with him for various unimportant reasons, and there’s this real undercurrent of insecurity over dating a girl who dated a Superman clone and being the fourth Aquaman sidekick and the only one that hasn’t died or turned evil. And really, when you get down to it, every character in this show has some sort of emotional baggage; M’gann’s a pathological liar, Nightwing is trying and failing to avoid being the man who made him who he is; there’s a short scene involving Beast Boy that, when you think about it, is just downright heartbreaking for the kid. There are even episodes that deal with child abuse and PTSD, if you look hard enough; I’m pretty sure one line had Superboy talking about considering suicide. This show does not mess around when it comes to putting characters through the ringer, whether it’s from the enemies they face, each other, or dealing with their own problems and shortcomings.

I’m honestly trying real hard to find legitimate complaints about the show that I can make without bringing up the big one. There are some characters or plot lines that just could’ve been trimmed or cut down altogether; Bumblebee and her boyfriend from about two episodes in Season One show up, but they don’t really do much aside from having relationship woes, and when the show addresses it, it just sort of wraps up pretty quickly. Some of the other new characters are just sort of there as window dressing, particularly Wonder Girl; she only has two episodes where she has sounds come out of her mouth other than pained grunts. Robin and Batgirl get slightly more screentime, but again, Tim and Barbara are just sort of background characters for most of the season. Still, when they do show up and get stuff to do, the animation is so amazing and perfect that all is forgiven.

Sometimes the exposition is a little too on the nose for my liking, but it’s still done in a way that’s compelling and makes you want to know more about the universe. But here’s my main complaint, and it’s a big one: the series as a whole has had its forward momentum shattered by the constant hiatuses. A show like this is greatly serialized, and 99% of each episode requires that you’ve seen the ones before it. Some may say that’s a bad thing, but it helps the plot move by and get down to the nitty gritty rather than just having every five episodes being random adventures, then giving the sixth episode a chance to expand the plot like Teen Titans sort of did. Some may say that it’s the reason why kids stopped watching it, but I don’t buy that. Despite what most people think, I think kids can and do handle complex storylines and don’t have to be coddled like they’re just waking up from general anesthetics.

It’s hard to find any episodes that I would classify as “the best”, because it wouldn’t be doing the rest justice, no pun intended. Each episode is in high quality, that even the ones I would qualify as “weaker” aren’t weak in the sense that the team just decided to go the easy route and knock off for lunch; they’re weak in the sense that they don’t really move the plot forward. Even the early episodes of Season One were weak only in a sense in that they were just finding their footing and not so much of anything like plot progression.

Young Justice truly is a DC show unlike any other before it. Using their teen heroes as a framework to expand on the larger DC universe as a whole sounded insane, but worked out great. The storytelling in this show is well done and logical, the animation is gorgeous, and the characters aren’t just hollowed out husks. Not only is a great cartoon worthy of its Emmy, it’s one of DC’s best cartoons, and very high up in my top TV shows of all time.

After taking a bit of a story breather in last week's episode, Young Justice picks right where it left off, with Kaldur and Artemis undercover in Black Manta's organization. Naturally, "killing" a former teammate and capturing another don't get you the seal of approval from all members of the Light, even if your dad is one of them. Kaldur's got one final test to prove where his allegiance lies, and well...the title of an episode has never fit perfectly than here.

"Darkest" sees Kaldur and Artemis, now known as Tigress, heading off with Icicle Jr. and the Terror Twins from the prison episode in season one. No one knows anything about Tigress, who debunks any rumors of her suspicious arrival in just a few sentences: "So which one of you wants to ask your 'open questions' of Black Manta? Which one of you wants to suggest his son, and his son's hand picked right hand, can't be trusted?" The five head to El Paso, Texas, home of Blue Beetle. Impulse shows up at his house asking for a play date, while the Scarab just wants to kill everyone and everything. Jaime's interactions with the Scarab find a nice balance between dark comedy and a strange sense of foreboding, and comic fans will know what's coming next when it takes over its host's body for a few moments.

Impulse and Blue Beetle head to the desert and start showing off their abilities to each other. Whatever bonds Bart's planning on forging are cut short, as the villains quickly overpower them. Impulse takes Kaldur's tracker and the two retreat to the Cave. Of course, nothing's that simple, as it turns out the tracker is a Trojan Horse, leading the teen villains straight to the Cave. In two nice touches, Superboy's pets, Sphere and Wolf---and yes, they are exactly what their names suggest--find or sense Kaldur and Artemis when they both start their home invasion, yet do nothing to stop them. Sphere even rolls away from Kaldur after he puts his hand on her, suggesting that he told her to get ready and be prepared for what's about to go down.

The Terror Twins and Icicle Jr. take down Beast Boy, Impulse, Nightwing, and Superboy. The latter two are left behind because of their lack of Meta-genes while the others are captured and Kaldur leaves a nice Malina Island bomb in the heart of the Cave in case both heroes try to pursue. Scarab takes brief control of Jaime's body to kill the villains, but still ends up getting taken just as instructed. Whatever the Light has planned for him have to be tied to their Partner, who most people have probably figured out by now. After some lingering suspicions, Kaldur orders Tigress to flip the switch and detonate the bomb. Watching the rooms of Mount Justice get destroyed is a definite "holy crap!" moment in the series. In "Bloodlines", part of Bart's future is shown with Mount Justice destroyed, and its current destruction and Bart's horrified "No!" upon seeing it in flames show that everything is unfortunately going according to plan.

Nightwing makes it to the Hall of Justice, where Wally shows up and starts tearing into him. Nightwing explains everything: Kaldur injected a tracker into La'gaan's bloodstream and gave Nightwing a flash drive containing all the information he's gathered so far, but Wally doesn't buy it. The former Kid Flash thinks that Kaldur's playing Dick Grayson, and with the evidence presented thus far, it's hard to stay by Dick's side. Kaldur didn't just destroy the Cave, he took three more members of the Team. Added to the fact that he lost Tula and learned Black Manta was his father in just a matter of months means that Kaldur could be more committed to the part than Nightwing wants to admit. The episode ends with Kaldur being admitted into the Light and meeting the new Partner, meaning that we should hopefully learn where the Atlantean's loyalty lies next week. With his character lasting longer here than in DC Comics New 52 continuity, Kaldur's fate is officially up in the air, and it looks like he's going to have a violent reunion with someone no matter what.

While this is going on, we're offered two hints at future developments. La'gaan's capture has him sharing room space with a villain and several children, one of which was Jaime's friend. If you've seen the San Diego Comic-Con trailer, or pay close attention, you can guess which hero we may be seeing in the near future. We're also shown Mal Duncan trying to reconnect with his girlfriend Bumblebee by hanging out with her at her lab, in a scene that clearly says, "Superpowers incoming" in neon with a giant clock underneath. It's actually surprising that it doesn't go that route (probably will in the future), but instead turns out to be a simple story of a couple trying to reconnect amidst an alien invasion and being superheroes. You know, the good old American romance.

In an interview, series producer Brandon Vietti said that "when you think it can't get worse, wait until the next episode." With that in mind, it's hard to think of what else can happen to the Team at this point. They've lost four members, have two undercover, their home is destroyed, and only seven of them are left at this point. The dark future shown a few episodes back looks to be getting closer to coming true, and it's clear that not everyone will be walking away from this safely like at the end of last season. We're at the halfway point, and it's time to see how crazier things can get.